Since it behooves both pundits and critics to admit when they’re wrong, I wanted to take a moment to hold myself accountable for a bit of crankiness in last...
| |  | | | | Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics | | | | | | Kit Harington as Jon Snow in "Game of Thrones." (HBO) | Since it behooves both pundits and critics to admit when they’re wrong, I wanted to take a moment to hold myself accountable for a bit of crankiness in last Wednesday’s newsletter. If you haven’t watched the Aug. 13 episode of “Game of Thrones,” but intend to, save this newsletter for later. If you don’t watch “Game of Thrones” and are sick of everyone talking about it, I’m really sorry, you only have two more weeks of this to go this year, and only eight weeks left of this to go total, so please be patient with the rest of us. All set? Okay. A week ago in this newsletter, I was grumbling about how readers kept asking me who I thought the “heads of the dragon” were going to be in “Game of Thrones.” I said I didn’t much care, that I didn’t have much invested in solving the show’s mysteries, and that if two characters other than Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) did end up mounting her remaining scaly children, that event would mostly confirm what I already basically knew, or at least assumed: that Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage) had some secret Targaryen lineage. My general irritation about the rush to “solve” television shows (and serialized storytelling more generally) rather than allow them to unspool in front of you had led me to discount the idea that there could be genuinely new information concealed in such mysteries. As it turns out, I was totally wrong! “Eastwatch,” the most recent episode of “Game of Thrones,” revealed by way of casual reference from Gilly (Hannah Murray) that not only was Jon the child of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark, but also they had been secretly married, and thus Jon is the legitimate product of their union. Which means that, if we’re sticking to the old-school laws of inheritance, Jon’s claim to the throne actually trumps his aunt’s. That is a seriously big deal, and something I wasn’t anticipating. So from now on, I’ll be more tolerant about the possibility that there are things I don’t know. I just may not rush to find them out before the story reveals them to prove how smart I am. I’ve already demonstrated that I’m not as clever as I think I am. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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